“This is one of the best — it’s one of the best streets that we’ve seen in California, or anywhere. We really don’t have anything like this in Auckland. It really should be a model.”

High praise from folks visiting from a city Conde Nast Traveler recently named one of the 23 best places to visit in 2023.

State Street’s pedestrian-friendly shift rose out of the early days of the pandemic. Since the emergency closure of the street to car traffic on Memorial Day weekend 2020, 10 blocks of the city’s main downtown corridor have been blocked off to car traffic so area businesses, especially restaurants, could reopen and operate outside.  

“They shut down indoor dining for restaurants to survive, this was the [solution],” Joey Somerville, manager of Joe’s Cafe in the heart of the district’s bar and restaurant zone, told SFGATE.

Three years later, life is different here now. “People really do like [the parklets],” he continued. “They like the outdoor dining. I was just in San Francisco, and I didn’t see a lot of parklets, maybe some in the Marina, but here it’s really taken off.”

Somerville said for many retailers, merchants and residents, the elimination of car traffic on what’s now referred to as the “State Street Promenade,” was one of the more fortuitous outcomes of the pandemic.  

A more pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare is also bringing back the original intent of the corridor, according to city officials.  

Tess Harris, Santa Barbara’s State Street master planner, told SFGATE last March that Santa Barbara’s general plan, adopted in 1964, envisioned State Street as a “pedestrianized downtown that encourages walking and biking and other aspects of mobility,”  

State Street as we know it seems to undergo its most dramatic changes in the wake of catastrophe. In 1925, after an earthquake ravaged Santa Barbara’s arterial thoroughfare to the ocean, the corridor was rebuilt using a Spanish Colonial Revival aesthetic, giving the street its signature white-washed stucco walls and red tile roofs.

Now, deciding on the next iteration of the street, namely whether to keep it permanently car-free, presents its own set of challenges.  

“I think it’s complicated,” Santa Barbara city Councilmember Eric Friedman told SFGATE this week. “There’s a little bit of restlessness about it now. We’re in this transition mode. We need to get to where we have a plan.”

Friedman said it’s clear to him that the benefits to shutting the street to through traffic, especially when it comes to “dining and outdoor walkability,” are numerous.

At the same time, he acknowledges the lack of a uniform approach, the street’s hallmark for the last century, has manifested concerns.

“There are a significant number of people who say [the closure] has reinvigorated State Street,” he said. “We do need to clean it up though, and do need to figure out the architectural components. Whatever we decide needs to fit the historic standard. [State Street] is one of the most beautiful architecturally in California if not the West Coast.”

Somerville agrees with Friedman on the uniformity and aesthetics issues.

“If you go up and down the street, the conformity in parklets isn’t there,” he said. “Everyone has their own vision. There’s some … interesting-looking ones. There’s some cool-looking ones. I think the city wants to come under one vision.”

The city has sought help to provide this uniform approach. Last week, the initial findings were presented to the public.

MIG, a Berkeley-based consulting firm that specializes in helping municipalities create pedestrian-friendly spaces, gave a three-hour presentation at the Santa Barbara Public Library. MIG laid out three options to the public on what the permanent future of a more pedestrian- and business-friendly State Street might look like.

The community forum, while billed as an exploratory session, still featured sparks, including a tense exchange between Peter Lewis, a local developer who is a member of the State Street committee, and State Street planner Harris.

Lewis felt that the designs were too pro-bike: “If that’s the case, this committee needs to kind of wrestle with that and decide if we agree with engineering,” Lewis said, according to Noozhawk.

“If I can just interrupt for a minute, it is not just the city staff that has recommended this,” Harris replied.

The consultants, whom the city reportedly paid nearly $800,000 to furnish the designs, gave three options. The first is called “flat and flexible.” The plan would remove curbs on some blocks and allow for only service or delivery vehicles in certain blocks during certain hours.  

A second alternative, called “multi-modal,” would keep the curbs and reinstall a one-way car traffic lane with a bike path. The third plan, “mixed/hybrid,” would incorporate elements of the first two, but implement them on a block-by-block basis to address each block’s greatest need. 
While Friedman has not yet voiced support of any specific plan, he said that different blocks of State Street have different types of businesses and some customization to address those issues is a priority for him.

Overall, he said the needs of “all kinds of people, especially seniors and people with disabilities,” remains a top consideration while planning.

“For me, I’d be interested to see how we’re going to activate the distinct areas of State Street,” he said. “We have a restaurant [district] between the 500 and 600 blocks, and then you have the Theatre District up further. These might be treated differently based on the amenities. It’ll be interesting to see public comments.”

Interesting is one way to describe it, Somerville said, noting that the city council has “taken a lot of heat” for attempting to come up with a plan that works for everyone.

“They’re just trying to get through the pandemic, trying to do the best they can,” he concluded.  

Another consideration is businesses outside the proposed State Street Promenade. The work of the city and consultants on State Street’s future also take into consideration additional car and pedestrian traffic impacting the area surrounding it, Friedman said.  

One such business outside the promenade footprint belongs to Zoë Magee, owner of Zoë Bikini, and Eric Dover, owner of Summerland Leather Company. Their shared workspace and showroom sits just south of the pedestrian-friendly zone on the 400 block of State Street. From the doorstep of their business, a plastic barricade denoting the start of the blocked-off street is easy to spot.

“We’re on kind of a sketchy corner here,” Magee told SFGATE, explaining that on the weekend, cars cruise on this section of State Street, stopping in front of Magee’s business where the road closure begins.

“But overall, are we in support of the closure? Oh, absolutely,” she added. “We much prefer it to the old way. We do have some spillover from the promenade, but it’s good. People are walking on our block, too. Extend it.” 

Dover, poking fun at the city’s efforts to appease everyone with solutions, suggested they might give away “a million dollars so everyone can draw up their own plan and pick a winner.” 

Magee echoed the sentiment of many: State Street is a historic and precious thoroughfare in California and needs to be accessed by the “next generation” of patrons — and that means more pedestrians and bikes and fewer cars. 

“You see families, whole families, walking together now and it’s incredible,” she said. “Maybe there’s three on foot and one in a stroller and one on a skateboard. You can do anything. It really frees people up to stroll, to access, to spend time down here.”

While the discussion is ongoing, the city expects to have a decision on what the future of State Street will look and feel like by the end of the year or early 2024. 

In the meantime, some, like the Gibbons family from New Zealand, couldn’t be happier with their choice to stop in Santa Barbara, thanks in large part to today’s version of State Street. 

“It’s lovely, just lovely,” Emma Gibbons said. “A relief from traffic in California that’s for sure. It’s exactly what we were looking for.”